— David Cameron on Blair during their first exchange in Prime Ministerial Questions

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997-2007. Perhaps unusually, Mr. Blair wasn't from the South but in fact started out in Scotland (he was born in Edinburghnote His ancestry is insanely complicated to explain, as his father was the bastard son of English actors adopted by a Glaswegian dockworker, and his mother was born in County Donegal to an Ulster Scots family, which had in recent generations shuttled between Glasgow (which was roughly where the family had migrated from centuries ago) and Ballyshannon several times. Whew.) and was educated in the English North and Scotland. He became the Labour Party MP for Sedgefield (also Oop North) and party leader in 1994. In 1997, he steamrollered John Major's Conservatives and won Labour's first election victory in 18 years.

Despite criticism (most notably for shifting the Labour party massively to the right and for invading Iraq), he captained Labour through three consecutive victories and left by own choice in 2007 after seeing off four opposition leaders before handing over to the Chancellor. It goes without saying the switch from Captain Charisma to No-Flash Gordon has fuelled several jokes. Blair currently acts as a UN Peace Envoy to the Middle East, something that confuses just about everyone. His premiership also saw a military intervention which ended the Sierra Leone Civil War - and, to this day, Sierra Leone is just about the only country with an unequivocally positive view of him. (Kosovo is the other, due to his staunch support for the 1999 NATO intervention.)

His enduring legacy was to reinvent the traditionally blue-collar Labour Party into "New Labour", with middle-class cubicle monkeys as his base. Purists criticized him for this, but Blair was merely a product of his time. His soothing TV manner and propensity to dodge hard issues made him more reminiscent of an American President than PM — a trend that continues with David Cameron, and made life quite difficult for Gordon Brown.

Not afraid of media, Blair played himself in The Simpsons and a sketch with Catherine Tate. Likely the only Prime Minister to have said "Am I bovvered?".

In British Media he tends to get portrayed either as a lapdog of George W. Bush, as the Straight Man to Bush's Red Oni, or as an insincere spin master. He had a habit, especially towards the end of his tenure, of pausing...at the end of every sentence as if trying to make it easier, to cut out sound bites. The apex/nadir of his talking in slogans surely came in Northern Ireland, where he said "This is not the time for soundbites, but I feel the hand of history on my shoulder." It got so pronounced that Have I Got News for You once played a minute long speech by Tony, then played it again with "The extraneous material" removed, which is to say they played 25 seconds of silence.

Early on in his premiership, Blair was noted for the election catchphrases "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" and "we have three priorities: education, education and education". These were widely parodied, madlibs-style, in the media and to some extent have entered the British lexicon. He was also noted for his Controversy-Proof Image, with scandals affecting his government seeming not to dent his own popularity (hence the nickname "Teflon Tony"). This made it all the bigger a contrast when the Iraq war became the one issue he could never walk away from.

He had a brief appearance in Spooks, where footage of him and George W. Bush was used in the context of the Prime Minister meeting the US President.

The unnamed Prime Minister whose dessicated corpse is found in a cupboard in the Doctor Who episode "Aliens of London" is clearly meant to be Tony Blair.

Tony Blair is also made fun of as the predecessor of the fictional Prime Minister in Love Actually. Which resulted in Blair explaining to people that doing something like what the PM did in the movie would be a really bad idea.

Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher come in for some ribbing in Coupling.

Patrick: You know what? We need Maggie back!

There's Tony Blair in the ending of the Albion graphic novel. Heh heh.

The Prime Minister in the 2008 Dan Dare miniseries is clearly based on him (confirmed by Word of God). He's also a snivelling opportunist who sells Earth out to the Mekon. Hmmmm...

Cartoons in The Times in the late 1990s flipped the sides, portraying Tony Blair as "Dan Blair, Pilot For The Foreseeable Future" and William Hague, the (bald) leader of the Opposition, as the Mekon.

Gary Callahan "The Smiler", the second President in the sixty-issue Transmetropolitan (not a bad run, considering that Warren Ellis' other works devote a meager two punchlines to Thatcher), is believed to have been largely based on Tony Blair. Trademarks include a near-permanent grin and an obsession with control and media spin. The main characters quickly come to consider him worse than the previous President, who was based on Richard Nixon.

Played by Michael Sheen in 2006's The Queen, who previously played him in 2003's The Deal and again in 2010's The Special Relationship. Screenwriter Peter Morgan seems to have a strong interest in what Blair is like behind closed doors.

Blair was one of Jon Culshaw's most popular impersonations in Dead Ringers: in another Comic Relief sketch, the real Blair appeared alongside Culshaw's version and played along, notably accepting Culshaw's use of his catchphrase "...in a very real sense..."

Private Eye started out with two Blair parodies: Blairzone, referencing his "Cool Britannia" attempts to be hip and with it, and "The Vicar of St. Albion's", referencing how some had compared his speech-giving style to that of a sanctimonious parish vicar preaching a sermon. Perhaps unexpectedly, it was the second one that lasted and became very popular, with Cabinet members fulfilling corresponding roles (for instance, Gordon Brown as the church treasurer) and foreign leaders being slotted into appropriate roles (e.g. American Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were made into the leaders of odd evangelical sects the Church of the Seventh-Day Fornicators and the Church of the Latter Day Morons—or Morbombs during the Iraq War—respectively).

"The Vicar of St. Albion's" got weird when Blair very publicly converted to Catholicism shortly after resigning as Prime Minister... (Especially since Blair kept his religion private while in office to avoid further mockery for being the Vicar of St. Albion's.)

And then immediately started offering the Pope unsolicited advice about modernizing his outlook...

They also made the extremely creepy "Integral" about New Labour's increasing tendency to introduce a surveillance society; the fandom sometimes count these three together as the Pet Shop Boys' "Blair Trilogy".

Played by Robert Lindsay (better known for his role in My Family) in two ITV satires, A Very Social Secretary (about Blair's Home Secretary David Blunkett) and The Trial of Tony Blair (where Blair is charged with war crimes for sending Britain into Iraq).

The Comic Strip Presents episode "The Hunt for Tony Blair" frames the main events and controversies of Blair's premiership — Iraq, Afghanistan, the shift from blue collar working class socialist 'old Labour' to middle-class Tory-lite "New Labour", the leadership feud with Gordon Brown, etc. — as a 1950s Ealing Studios-style Film Noir about Blair being on the run after being falsely (or not-so-falsely) accused of several murders.

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